The big questions are the hard questions. The prior post elicited a comment that linked the song about Jesus' same love for everyone with love between same sexes. A big question. Then I was reading an article about why we're losing the war on poverty (is it possible to win?), which poses the bigger question of how do we address poverty in our contemporary context. Another big question. At the same time I am being challenged by what it means in my situation to respond the the "third commandment" to go and make disciples of all the world (further stimulated by this story). Yet a further big question.
Over time I'm going to try say something about these and other big questions ... as a way to address my own hubris if for no other reason. We all need to be wrestling with the big questions. If you had 1 minute in an elevator, what would your response be? If you were given 20 minutes at a dinner table, what would you say about these topics? It's worth formulating a position that you can articulate and justify, as opposed to simply feel, even if your position is evolving. Because you will be challenged by these questions. At the end of the day, how will your actions be transformed by your position?
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Mix music, images, and words. Stir the brain gently. Let simmer. Eat while hot. (From rant to reason) The hilarious "Wrong Worship" video captures the pervasive mood in many a church's pew, as we sit in beautiful professional services that lull us into a comfort zone of fake security. This apathy bugs me ... a lot! Three times in the last week I've been in church situations when I've wanted to cry "just do it, at least do something!" How many in church are engaged? What percentage are once-a-month attendees? And even the regulars, how many actually do anything beyond showing their faces? Surely "make disciples" means "do something". And if we're not doing something, then are we failing at what is arguably the third greatest commandment. So what makes someone take action? What motivates activism? How does someone arise out of apathy? Make it personal: when did YOU (when did I) last actually do something about poverty, societal injustice, climate change, the financial system, political corruption or any one of the myriad other ills in our world? Let alone the suffering of our neighbour. And I'm not talking about that dinner party moment where we all love express our indignation about the current headline of the day. OK, so it's easy for me to say, and the finger also points straight at back me. But my culpability in no ways changes the fact that our churches are often the perfect quiet backwaters of good intentions. There are two practical sides to this problem: permission givers, and motivated hearts. If someone is moved to action but unheard by leaders, then their passion becomes passive. And if leadership cries "we need to do something", but there are no motivated hearts, then their voices fade as echoes in a cave. Lets say little about the permission givers (for now) - in our church I believe we have good permission givers. Suffice to say here that globally there is a striving for an ever-more professional church, but often there serves only to comfortably massage the consciences of the pew patrons. Any latent activism among the amateurs of a congregation can face an immense hurdle to find official mandate, let alone proactive support. Churches need leadership that says "Far better for our people to get down and dirty with their hands as they seek to serve", and then be willing to accept the inevitable mistakes by some. At least then church would be filled with people who are not only there to cheer on the professionals. The key question is "what will motivate us?" There are no shortages of needs and our churches are overflowing with disengaged talent and capacity. Where does the apathy come from? _ Motivation requires comprehension. Have you ever witnessed a bad car accident, or know someone who's had a first hand experience of tragedy? Compare the personal impact of that with how we respond to the endless bad-news in the media ... shootings, famine, rebellion, disasters. We're surrounded in our culture of immersions, yet we're strangely numb to the suffering. We walk by the destitute in the street with barely a thought. Without personal comprehension we remain unmoved. We need to comprehend! God will use any little bit we dare give him, but we've got to get a bit of comprehension to trickle down from our head knowledge and into our heart. No wonder the Bible talks of how Jesus was moved ... in his heart! Compassion is not a mind-thing, it's in the heart. Sadly, in our culture of material acquisition we are deeply fearful of heart-pain, and we're expert at building defenses against it. We are so successful at this that now we can even find perverse pleasure in a media fest of violence (just look at the tabloid culture), as long as we're not personally involved. Where do we find comprehension? It takes courage to open your eyes. And I'm not talking about seeing the world that is actually around us, but being brave enough to look at God. All ultimate reference for our motivation is rooted in how we understand the holiness of God. Holy, its an odd word. If I say to someone in church that "God is holy", they'll nod in agreement, yet our shared understanding is shallow, poor, and peripheral at best. Jesus spoke to those who knew a language of religion, and so he turned his message into powerful metaphors and parables. He broke the familiarity of language that they thought they understood, and opened their eyes. The Bible says that God is holy, holy, holy. Not merely once holy. The Bible never says that God is love, love, love, or mercy, mercy, mercy, or wrath, wrath, wrath. Yet, all that this tells me is that holiness is really important. It doesn't help me comprehend holiness and misses the concept that God is completely other, entirely unique, no one is like him. His holiness is above all his other attributes, its his defining attribute: his love is holy, his power is holy, his justice is holy, "Because He is holy, all His attributes are holy" (Tozer). This is not like the common uniqueness of a snowflake ... yes, each snowflake is unique, but then there are so many "unique" snowflakes. Imagine instead if there was only ever one snowflake. It's attributes (pointed, spiky, cold, star shaped, etc) are all uniquely expressed in this one snowflake. The attributes don't define it's snowflakeness, instead this singular snowflake defines its attributes. Only one snowflake would be truly unique, without compare, nothing can measure against it. If we say God is love, then we imply he should be able to excuse sin (and how much do we hear that today!). But if we say God is holy, then that is what defines his love, and his justice, wrath, and compassion. These only exist because he is holy ... because of his total and singular perfection without comparison. Because of holiness, I am undone. He tells me to be holy because that was how he chose to create me, and the choices of an unchanging God holds for eternity. Yet his very holiness destroys me. "Some Christians spend the first six days of each week sowing their wild oats, then they go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure." (Anonymous) As Martyn Lloyd-Jones says, "What gives us conviction of sin is not the number of sins we have committed; it is the sight of the holiness of God." Corollary: if I have no sight of the holiness of God, then I have no conviction, and if I have no conviction, I have no motivation, and if I have no motivation, and I am dead in apathy. If I keep alive the big question, not get bogged down in the minutia of personal peeves, so I can begin to understand what it means to have a sight of holiness. If I can only surface from the twitter culture, the reality shows of trivia, the ego-trips of facebook, the self promotion of instagram selfies, and the tyranny of time. Only then can I find a reference, only then can I find the root of motivation for my response, and only then as a church will we ever get our collective butt off the pews. Tozer again: “Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? ... tuned, not to each other, but to another standard ... each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be." The comprehension of holiness is the underpinning of all great revivals. If we want to see people moved to serve, we need to begin to comprehend holiness. And as we gain comprehension, so we'll be irresistibly moved to attempt the impossible. I get into debates. Too often perhaps. They're good discussions, generally. But often there is the unstated fact that your god is sometimes different from mine, even if we call him the same name. From my perspective it often seems that the god other people are supposedly serving is a porcelain figurine that is merely pleasing to the beholders eye. My God is, unfortunately, not so compliant. In fact, I find him downright scary if I really think about it. Meaning of course that I don't think as much about him as I should! God must be bizarre to our perspective ... by definition he must be really incomprehensible. If not, well I suggest than he's not really worthy the title "God." The ancients conveniently gave their gods useful names like Zeus which differentiated one from another. Today we make Hollywood movies about those gods. The modern equivalent seems to be much harder to discern. The gods of today are rather like the Smiths of England, the Christensens of Denmark, or the Johanssons in Sweden. The name is the same, and found everywhere, but the people behind the name are very different. And so Christianity seems to be represented by churches where the people worship a range of gods under the common name of Jesus. So who is my God? What is his nature? Well, I sat down and simply wrote down about my God, and here's my list. With each I've included some of the conundrums and contemplations that come to mind. I'm writing from experience, and I'm not going to quote other people's opinions. This is what I've learned and experienced! Each of these characteristics are those of a person, not an object. Each deserves a book in and of themselves ... but one has to start somewhere.
Twenty three characteristics of God's nature seems a good number, so I'll stop there although I could go on and on. The point is, I serve a God worthy of the title God. He's big. That means God also includes things I'd rather not have to face up to, but if they were not part of God, he would not be God, and my relationship would be futile.
So how's your god doing? Gotcha. Why did you click the link? The title is typical of the current media and reflects a deeper issue. A suggestive title (and image) makes you feel you're missing out if you don't get the rest of the story (just look at the headlines on huffingtonpost.com). This attitude reinforces the idea that popular equates to important and true. So what does this have to do with same-sex-marriage, mystical religion, or child education? Read on. Let's consider the wisdom-of-the-crowd phenomena -- we apply it all the time; seeking peer opinion, in the game show "Who wants to be a Millionaire" contestants can use the option "Ask the audience", its a basis of democracy, we look for Facebook "Likes", there's voting on blog comments etc., etc. The idea is that the errors of the individuals cancel out, and the final average is then a very good estimate of the real answer. It works well ... some times. It can also show collective ignorance, especially in a highly connected society where we already know what other people are thinking. But it also can fail spectacularly. For example in science we see a classic wisdom-of-the-crowd failure in the echo chamber of climate change denial blogs; as more and more people say what others want to hear, so the collective ignorance is reinforced and goes to the opposite of truth. People don't like to be wrong or thought stupid, and they're often too clueless to know how ignorant they are, so minority voices get derided. Add to this the natural desire to be part of a "movement", the wish to hear only what one wants to hear, our illusion of superiority, the idea that the collective voice is the closest to the truth, and the power of peer pressure. One can quickly see how many of the current societal changes are working out, and how easy it is for vigilantism or other collective deviancies to form. Now apply this to issues of morality. Say, for example, religious beliefs, prostitution, same sex marriage, death penalty, child spanking, etc. Here is one example: a polling study shows Jews are becoming more tolerant of deviancies to the traditional beliefs, including that not believing in God is compatible with being Jewish. A poll? In other words, they're sampling popular opinion and the take away message is that truth is changing. Should we have a poll about gravity? Murder? Child trafficking? Here we have a problem, and two choices face us. On the one hand, moral truth is fluid and flexible and we make it to be what we like. If we do so, then we only can dislike and not condemn any "wisdom of the crowd" choice. We might think it abuses or disadvantages a minority, but if we are in the minority, too bad. Alternatively we say there is a truth that is not a matter of opinion. This is very discomforting because suddenly I am not the determiner of right and wrong. Christians say truth is not an opinion, not a rule, but a standard deriving from who God is. Therefore Christians have some pressing problems that they (we) are not being vocal about. Some examples, for instance. How should Christians handle: Syncretism: All religions lead to the same God. But surely God determines how to know him? We can't dictate the terms and conditions of a God relationship. We might rail and rant against what we perceive as an injustice in the God-claims of a religion, but it's not for us to make the definition. Well ok, you can, but then you get plain silliness such as Pastafarianism, or the Sunday Assembly - a godless church for atheists (which is in the process of fracturing because of its a wisdom-of-the-crowd failure). So does God say one-way? Is any religion ok? And most critically, what is our reference for saying one or the other? Our preferences have zero value! What pleases us is unimportant. What is true is true whether we like it or not. Same sex marriage: The historical church, at least by the democracy of the dead, has overwhelmingly said this is not in accordance with God's nature (this alone does not make it true). By contrast the minority-but-alive contemporary "wisdom-of-the-crowd" wants to define otherwise. No-one denies that two people of the same sex can love each other with the four loves as do heterosexual couples. That is not the issue. The question is, what does God say? For example, no-one denies that I can go to the movies, smoke a pipe, be a nudist, cheat on the taxman, breed crocodiles, drink alcohol, gossip, cheat, or lie. The issue is not whether I can behave in some manner or not, the question is what does God think about it? If my intention is to be in relationship with God, then what is against God's nature undermines my relationship. Mistakes and failures are one thing ... God knows I am flawed and imperfect. However, habitual practice is like thumbing one's nose at God as if saying "I know you don't like it, but I'm going to do it anyway." The Christian church is notably inarticulate about these and many other issues. Instead the church seems to be wracked with internal polarized debates with factions seeking to re-invent a faith to accommodate their preferences. Globally there will never be accord; groups will continually fragment while keeping a common label "Christian", and thereby making the term ultimately to mean everything and mean nothing. Yet if there is a God, then one thing God is, is definitive! The muddied waters that are growing under the banner of "Christian" is anything but definitive. At the end of the day it is up to the local community church to not take on the "wisdom-of-the-crowd", but to be articulate about what is and what is not, as defined by God and not ourselves. Its January 2014, the Christmas break is done, work is looming, so take 30 seconds while you can:
From the last 2 weeks what will you likely remember in 1 years time? Take 30 seconds, jot a note. Will you really remember that? Is what you'll remember something beautiful to remember? Are you memories likely to join the great morass of "more of the same", and a year from now they'll just be unfocused shadows from a timeless past? Christmas is a time to make those memories you wouldn't otherwise have time for. Whether you invested in those to the maximum, or merely bathed in the opportunity, or even if you failed to completely switch of the incessant nag of work, those memories are what you carry of value into the future. Perhaps you're now in memory-poverty? Take 30 seconds. What will you change next time? For me, these few weeks as we swapped out 2013 was:
Making memories. I hope you did too. |
Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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